UTSA hosts African-American literature expert

(Feb. 13, 2009)--The UTSA Department of English will host African-American literature expert and Harvard professor Werner Sollors as a UTSA Brackenridge Distinguished Visiting Lecturer speaking on "A Photographer and His Subject" at 7 p.m., Friday, Feb. 13 in the Business Building University Room (2.06.04), 1604 Campus. The lecture is free and open to the public.

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Sollors is the Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature, professor of African and African-American studies and director of graduate studies at Harvard University. One of his most noteworthy publications, among an impressive array of books and articles, is his book "Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature" (1997), focusing on a topic which is especially timely in these first 100 days of the Obama presidency.

He is co-founder and co-director of Harvard's Longfellow Institute, which is dedicated to the study of literature of the United States in languages other than English.

For more information, contact Steven Kellman, professor of English, at (210) 458-5216 or Bridget Drinka, associate professor and chair of the Department of English, at (210) 458-5130.

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Werner Sollors

Sollors earned a Ph.D. degree at the Freie Universitat Berlin and taught in Berlin, at Columbia University and at Universita degli Studi di Venezia. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1983.

His major publications include "Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Literature and Culture" (1986), "Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature" (1997), a book-length contribution on ethnic modernism in volume 6, Sacvan Bercovitch's "Cambridge History of American Literature" (2003) and "Ethnic Modernism" (2008). He has published essays on Mark Twain, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry Roth, Richard Wright and Amiri Baraka, among many others.

Among his numerous edited books are "Frank J. Webb: Fiction, Essays, Poetry" (2005), "An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New" (2004), "Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana" (2004) and "Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader" (1996).

Sollors received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1981) and the Constance Rourke award for the best essay in American Quarterly in 1990. In 2000, he was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Additionally, he is a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and of the Bayerische Amerika-Akademie.

He is listed in "Who's Who in the World," "Who's Who in America," "Who's Who in Education," "Who's Who in American Scholarship," "Who's Who Among America's Teachers" and "2000 Outstanding Scholars of the 21st Century."